The Brooklyn Rail

On the evening of Thursday, February 12, in Lyon, Quentin Deranque was hospitalized in critical condition. The twenty-three-year-old neofascist—euphemized by the press as an “extreme-right-nationalist-identitarian-militant”—had sustained serious brain and skull damage during a confrontation between fascists and anti-fascists earlier that day. He was declared brain-dead on Friday, and became a national martyr by the time he passed away the next day, on Valentine's Day.

The fight had erupted when Némésis, a “femonationalist” group, and their service d’ordre (the men who came, at their request, to “protect them”) staged a protest against a talk by Rima Hassan, the Franco-Palestinian member of parliament for La France Insoumise (LFI), as part of a conference at Lyon’s Sciences Po campus. A video collage by Le Monde claims to establish the “facts” as they unfolded, consisting of videos filmed on site accompanied by an account compiled by the prosecutor in Lyon. The video presents itself as using the kinds of “scientific” methods employed by investigative journalists, at least aesthetically. According to the prosecutor’s account, Némésis unfurled a banner denouncing Rima Hassan’s presence, and a scene unfolded as others tried to seize it. The prosecutor implicitly emphasises the Némésis collective’s own claims that “two women were strangled and thrown to the floor,” although we cannot quite see this in the video.

According to Némésis, the tension between the group and their opponents continued down the street. The prosecutor’s commentary is misleading, since it suggests that the same handful moved further off, yet this is not proven. The most violent confrontation took place at about 6 p.m., near an underpass about five hundred meters from the initial skirmish. The prosecutor says that it was “a few tens of meters away,” and that Némésis had asked some friends to accompany them in case of violence. “Those people nevertheless stayed far off,” he says.

By the underpass, two groups, both masked, violently confronted each other. According to anti-fascist media site Contre Attaque—which first published the video later reappropriated by Le Monde—we see one fascist brandish a metal bar or a crutch and another throw a grenade. An additional analysis of the images by Blast shows that one fascist used tear gas on the crowd three times. The prosecutor’s commentary, however, simply mentions these events in the passive voice: “A smoke grenade was thrown,” “a metal bar was carried,” without attributing them to the right-wing activists. Given the subsequent death of Deranque, it would be easy to assume the bar was brandished by anti-fascists.

As for the facts, which are not yet established, it would seem that the anti-fascists chased the majority of the fascists off, and three individuals, including Quentin Deranque, ended up surrounded. He was apparently beaten by six people and left injured on the ground. A friend picked him up, and the two walked across the river and met with other friends to regroup. According to residents who witnessed the scene, Deranque did not want to go to the hospital. This is plausible in the context of a street fight between anti-fascists and fascists, both of whom might want to avoid legal consequences. His state worsened, and he was picked up about two kilometers away from the initial scene of violence by paramedics, declared “in a critical condition,” and then in a coma.

Since Deranque’s death on Saturday, the media, politicians, and especially the extreme right have scrabbled to paint him as a non-violent Christian, a martyr and a saint, dead for his ideas, but also innocent of too much political engagement. As well as emphasising his patriotism, they also like to mention that his mother is Peruvian. They depict the event as an “ambush,” a deliberate and targeted “lynching” by “left-wing extremists,” where Quentin was singled out and tracked down by anti-fascists. It is important to them to portray this as something other than a violent confrontation between two groups whose existence is mutually defined. However, it is the case that Némésis intended to sabotage, disrupt, or ambush the conference, and came with a service d’ordre. It was a serious confrontation. No one in Lyon, whether a fascist or an anti-fascist, is a stranger to street fights. Némésis, however, continues to emphasise that their “friends” made up an “informal” service d’ordre, to make sure nothing got out of hand; in reality, they were armed and masked.

In the hours following the death, Quentin’s family and representatives of the extreme right sought to sanitise Quentin as an unsuspecting mathematics student, a Catholic (a recent convert), who loved his country and was murdered for his ideas. Videos abound in which far-right militants claim that Quentin was part of no particular group, he just “lent a hand” when something was going on. Alice Cordier, head of Némésis and a Catholic activist, called him a “friend of friends” who had come specially to help the women of her group feel safe. (Despite having so many “friends,” a photo of another, still living, neofascist was initially put on posters, which caused confusion.)

Deranque, in reality, had co-founded his own neofascist group, Allobroges in Bourgoin Jallieu in May 2025. With them, he was part of the service d’ordre for the May 9, 2025 neo-Nazi march in Paris commemorating a far-right martyr killed by the police in the 1990s. Journalists Donatien Huet of Mediapart and Enzo Rabouy trawled through hours of their own footage from that day, and were able to identify Quentin in the crowd. His group were in a bloc with others wearing T-shirts with white nationalist celtic crosses, and the slogan, “The white race will save European identity” (originally in French, translated here into English). Deranque took part in physical training such as boxing with other fascists to “defend” Lyon from anti-fascists, although the people with whom he trained insist that this was “pure self-defense.” He was part of the royalist, Sorelist, anti-Semitic, far-right group Audace [Audacity]. He was a regular participant in Academia Christiana, an integrist, identitarian, anti-immigration Christian organization. The organization claims to seek a “third way” between liberal globalization and Marxist anti-globalization, which roughly translates to being virulently anti-Semitic, passionately anti-abortion, and in favor of policies such as remigration.

Politicizing Quentin’s death by trying to normalize his neo-Nazism, the right have impressively straddled two horses moving in opposite directions—he is dead for his ideas, but was not particularly politically involved. The desired implication is obvious: you too, moderate, could die for your ideas. The idea of an ordinary citizen killed for his ideas ran straight from Némésis to the higher echelons of French politics. On February 17, a minute’s silence was observed in the National Assembly for the young neofascist. The president of the National Assembly, Yaël Braun-Pivet, introduced the hommage with: “No one should die at twenty-three. No one should die for their ideas. In the name of everyone, I address our thoughts to his grieving family and friends.” It is almost as if “twenty-three” had attained the abstract quality of “for one’s ideas.”¹ Perhaps the emphasis on his youth is part of the attempt to minimize his political engagements, and present them as a youthful and rambunctious romanticism that he might well have grown out of. Laurent Nuñez, Minister of the Interior, said he would not oppose the request for a commemorative march for the young fascist in Lyon. That march is happening as I write, huge and protected by police. (The groups organizing the march made sure to circulate instructions that no one should show “provocative” tattoos or make “polemical” gestures. Representatives are on hand to dismiss reports of Nazi salutes as “clapping;” leftwing media seem to be exhausting themselves combing footage for salutes, and captioning them “What Nazis do when no one is looking,” or else: “Nazi salutes at Nazi march. Forks found in kitchen!”)

Although no one opposed the minute of silence (surely no one could!),² Mathilde Panot, LFI deputy and president of the party in the Assembly, pointed out that no minute of silence had been observed for the six people killed by the extreme right since 2022. Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu called her “abject” for having compared one death with another. Clement Meric, killed by fascists in 2013 in what is probably the closest incident to this one in recent history, was in fact accorded a minute’s silence at the Assemblée, but no silence was observed for the racist murders of Angela Rostas, pregnant Roma woman shot with a shotgun; Aboubakar Cissé, Malian man stabbed fifty-seven times in a mosque; or Hichem Miraoui, killed by his neighbor, who had written about wanting to kill Arabs and shoot at Maghrebin peoples. There are many more, but even the high-profile shootings of Kurds Emine Kara, Mîr Perwer, and Abdurrahman Kizil by a right wing militant went unmentioned in the Assembly.

Incidentally, when a minute of silence was proposed at the Council of Paris for El Hacen Diarra, a thirty-five-year-old Mauritian man strangled and beaten to death by police in the commissariat of the 20th arrondissement of Paris on the night of January 14 this year, right and center-right deputies (including Rachida Dati, who is running for Mayor, and whose campaign focus is on “cleaning up the city”) walked out.

According to Isabelle Sommier, in a study which has been much read over the last week called “Political Violence in France: From 1986 to the Present” (Violences politiques en France: De 1986 à nos jours, Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 2021), six people have been killed specifically by rightwing activists since 2017. The author underlines the “specialization” of the extreme right in political violence. Another study showed that of fifty-three ideologically motivated murders between 1986 and 2021, 90 percent were committed by the extreme right. As for Lyon, the territory is marked by violent confrontations between anti-fascists and fascists. Anti-fascists complain that fascist attacks are treated with total impunity. Of 102 recorded incidents of extreme right violence since 2010 in Lyon, 70 percent have gone unpunished.

Némésis had immediately identified Jeune Garde as responsible for Deranque’s death, a group cofounded by LFI deputy for the Vaucluse Raphaël Arnault in 2018, before he became an MP in 2024; it was legally dissolved in June 2025. Arnault wrote on X: “I learn of this death with horror and disgust.” He subtly presents Lyon as the epicenter of skirmishes between the far-right and anti-fascists in France, saying that what he’s been expecting for years has finally happened. He expresses condolences.

The facts have not been established, but as of today six people are under investigation for voluntary homicide. The defendants are between twenty and twenty-six years old, some are employed, some unemployed, and one is Raphaël Arnault’s parliamentary assistant, Jacques-Elie Favrot (the twenty-five-year-old resigned from his position because of his proximity to the affair). He is under investigation for complicity, not murder. All manner of talk show hosts have been pulling in media-savvy deputies from the LFI to ask them if Arnault should be fired from his position, despite the fact that he was not present on the day of the fight. Rima Hassan was also expected to comment, and did so immediately, to distance herself from the events which had unfolded outside of the conference in Lyon. On Friday, February 13, she said she had heard, “with horror,” about Quentin, between life and death in the hospital. She underlined that she herself had only ever “worked with the service d’ordre provided by the LFI.”

On the night following Deranque’s death, neo-Nazis marched in Ménilmontant, a historically anti-fascist neighborhood of Paris, to commemorate their martyr. They chanted, “We are at home here,” something categorically untrue. Later that evening, swastikas and anti-Semitic slogans were tagged on the Place de la République, some mentioning the former head of the Institut du Monde Arabe [Arab World Institute], Jack Lang, who is under investigation for his links to Jeffrey Epstein. None of this caused much of a stir. There were also protests and Catholic prayers at the Pantheon. In an attempt to clean up their image, the far right put the Némésis women in front where they would be photographed holding their banners. Notable Islamophobe Éric Zemmour was present, as was Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, whispering furiously to journalists with her hair in a frazzled wet braid, apparently speaking over the prayers. She said that the LFI are unequivocally responsible, because they support the Jeune Garde and therefore have “blood on their hands.” The Némésis women are almost well dressed, some of them in high boots. Their style seems to be a brief nod to Les Brigandes, a far-right band who live in a commune in the South of France. They are obviously trying not to be drab. They carry rosaries.

Of all that is seemingly new or worse about the extreme right, the most striking element does seem to be this feminist angle, which has developed particularly since #NousToutes (Me Too). Of course, far-right deputies have already made bids for gay communities and feminists, and this is their own grassroots version. Very young Catholic women, with names like Aliette Espieux and Domitille Casarotto, are involved in Christian-democratic parties, seem to have been radicalized in their own Catholic families, and are campaigning against euthanasia, immigration, and abortion. According to Némésis, it is immigrants who rape; they demonstrate by, for example, wearing niqabs in front of the Eiffel Tower on March 8 (International Women’s Day) and asking people if they’re afraid of France becoming “like this.” Aliette Espieux, married to a neo-Nazi, grew up in Carpentras, a town in Vaucluse famous for the desecration of the Jewish graves in its cemetery in 1990. She wears lipstick and a baseball cap with the slogan “Generation Pro Life.” Domitille is a little more Catholic-modest, hails from activism against gay marriage, and can be found wringing her hands on Instagram about how the EU is encouraging euthanasia.

Quentin Deranque was no Charlie Kirk, but he’s being used for similar purposes by the politicians as well as by insignificant neo-Nazis. Appearing live on the TV program Le Grand jury RTL - Le Figaro - Public Sénat on February 15, Minister of Justice Gerald Darmanin pointed a finger at the “extreme left,” but also at LFI, in several ways, insisting that “The Jeune Garde kill, the LFI has to condemn it.” “The killer has a name, and that name is the ultra-left.… Today, it’s the ultra-left who killed, it’s indisputable.” Borrowing words from the Bible, he invoked a fairly nebulous theory of language:

There are indeed political discourses, particularly those of La France Insoumise and the far left, which unfortunately lead … to very unbridled violence on social media, extreme violence on social media and in the physical world.… In the beginning was the word. But words can kill. Simple minds, radicalized minds can use these words to intervene in the physical realm and murder, assault, and threats.

Enlarging the target, he said that LFI were complacent about violence and hadn’t said “a word” about Quentin’s death. The weekly magazine Marianne published, as their front page, a picture of Arnault, Hassan, and Mélenchon (leader of LFI), with the headline: “The New Anti Fascists,” with “Anti-” struck out.

In response to the many ideologically motivated accusations being thrown around, Le Monde published a special article on February 22 offering definitions of the extreme left, ultra-left, radical left and antifa, for those not in the know. It includes an interesting definition of council communism, as well as the reflection that “extreme left” in the nineteenth century meant reformists, but since then has been “degraded” by its affiliation with “violent regimes.” A few days earlier the LFI headquarters in Paris were evacuated for a bomb threat; the note read: “I just put a bomb in your offices, I did my work well, at night so that you won’t find it, I will kill you all. I will kill all the wogs, leftists, and other n****rs, everything will explode at 1 p.m. and you’ll all die. You will pay by the hundred for having killed Quentin. In 2027 we’ll do the dirty.” Like the swastikas at the Place de la République, this also caused little stir. In Rennes, anti-fascist students were doxxed. This drama is unfolding in the lead-up to March’s municipal elections. The extreme right have made several advances, including having their marches authorised, being martyred on a national level, and becoming more palatable thanks to their victimhood.

On Monday in a Parisian bookshop, anti-fascists and leftists crammed into a too-hot room to listen to Alberto Toscano talk about his book, Late Fascism. He talked a lot about epistemology and historical analogies. Someone asked a question about Quentin Deranque and about what was specific about fascism in France. It was the first question, but I don’t remember the answer because it was rather vague. The discussion got stuck between the grand scale of an intellectual history of fascism, seemingly disconnected from any concrete reality, and the all too specific level of fascist and anti-fascist street violence. The talk could only make one wonder what it is about fascism that reduces everyone to a kind of bingo card politics, identifying this or that tendency, discourse, tattoo, or T-shirt, managing to say very little in the way of analysis. Questions the audience posed about Georg Lukács seemed pale in the face of the moment, and we did not talk much about the present. Everyone was near fainting, and not just from the heat. It was quite clear from the conversations in the room that nearly everyone felt the present moment was evading them, that the murder of Quentin Deranque would not be good news, and that the discussion had been long and obfuscatory.